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What If We Forget How to Get Lost?

Today, it's a lot harder to get lost. No matter where you are, you’re never more than a touch screen away from one of a frosty computer voice telling you to “turn left here.” Are we in danger of forgetting how to get lost? Maybe we’ll have to learn how. That’s why Rebecca Solnit wrote an instruction manual — “A Field Guide to Getting Lost.”

Rebecca Solnit: There's a sort of literal rule getting lost. "Oh no I don't know where I am. It's a problem. What do I do next.

But even that poses interesting questions. You know you don't know what's going to happen next you don't know where you are. Is it an adventure? Have you extended beyond the bounds of your own safety your own knowledge?

Is there something to be discovered? Will you become somebody else when you find out where you are. And so navigating that danger and discovery, going beyond the sort of safe and familiar and contained. It something that interests me a lot: coming to terms with a world in which we're not lost necessarily geographically. But maybe more metaphysically, more in terms of a world full of surprises. Last temporally.

This book is written against the grain of the moment when I think which is very much about safety, familiarity, control about having your cell phone and GPS and automatic garage door opener. Really change your experience so that you don't find yourself beyond your own knowledge or beyond the familiar much, and I'm interested in what happens when you do get beyond. If you're really paying attention or thinking really living your life you'd turn out not to be who you thought you were, that person you're married to turned out to be somebody else too, your life opens up in ways you could have never planned for.